


the delightful discovery of having left a trace

by tin_girl



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Coming of Age, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, it does make sense just go with it, slow journey to self-acceptance through... dirt, the inherent homoeroticism of fantasizing about running away with your best friend, this ended up being disgustingly personal i'm appalled
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 06:20:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26348506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tin_girl/pseuds/tin_girl
Summary: Blood, it seems, is now all about context, bad when you’re wounded by something evil living in the sewers and losing it too fast, but something altogether different when you cut your palm open and clasp somebody else’s.In the end, that’s how Eddie grows up: his blood on Richie’s lip and a resolution of a sort.Or, Eddie, searching himself for proof of the boy he's always loved.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 17
Kudos: 44





	the delightful discovery of having left a trace

**Author's Note:**

> Despite the warning, this doesn't really have graphic depictions of violence, but better safe than sorry! What it does have is some mentions of period-typical homophobia with everything that entails 
> 
> The au for this is that the losers actually got rid of IT for good the first time around and get to remember and grow up together, and it follows them over the years (up until they're about 16)

You came to the side of the bed

and sat staring at me.

Then you kissed me—I felt

hot wax on my forehead.

I wanted it to leave a mark:

that’s how I knew I loved you. Because I wanted to be burned, stamped,

to have something in the end—

~Louise Glück, _The Encounter_

When Eddie says that he sees germs everywhere, he means that he sees germs _every_ where: whenever he perches on Bill’s bed, he imagines clouds of them rising up all around him, whenever he settles cross-legged on Ben’s carpet, he thinks of the number of mites writhing underneath him, and whenever he cuts his finger, he refuses to put it in his mouth.

Half the time, when Richie speaks, he’s just aggravating enough for Eddie to forget the germs. Strange, that, because Richie is by far the dirtiest boy Eddie knows, forever doing things like jumping into puddles, popping used chewing gums he’s had in his pocket for hours back in his mouth, and picking at his scabs until they come off too early. His glasses are _always_ smudged, even though Eddie wipes them clean with the hem of his shirt for him every half an hour or so, and his fingers are _always_ sticky, only, somehow, no matter how much he touches Eddie (and he touches Eddie _constantly_ ), later, there’s no trace. Eddie knows because he’s taken to carefully inspecting himself in search of post-Tozier marks – Richie’s fingers, stained with dry Derry dirt, will curl over Eddie’s shoulder, brushing skin where it meets Eddie’s throat, and, after, Eddie’s neck will be spotless, no proof.

(Eddie still hasn’t decided whether that’s a good thing or not: whenever he comes back home clean, he feels like he doesn’t have friends after all, like he’s made them all up.

Then, sometimes he feels like that even when he’s still with the losers, watching them laugh and laughing along, but certain that it’s all in his head. Eventually, he’s always reminded of how that’s not the case, of course, Richie shoving a wet finger in Eddie’s ear or patiently lining up ants on Eddie’s leg until Eddie notices and starts jumping up and down to shake them off, screaming murder, and Eddie would never admit it, but thank God. Thank God.)

When Beverly moves away, there’s less sprawling on grass and less dirt, and Eddie doesn’t like it at all. She sends letters, but it doesn’t get tolerable, not until the first time Richie shoves dirt behind the collar of Eddie’s shirt. Eddie has grown (figuratively _and_ literally, still far too short, but one inch less so), and he untucks his shirt instead of yelling, enjoying the thought of leaving a trail behind him on his way back home.

“You’re no fun anymore,” Richie complains, but he’s lying, because his knee is touching Eddie’s like a truce. Eddie, who knows how much of skin is just dead cells, is not at all sure why it feels more significant than it should, an almost-itch rather than a simple point of contact.

Maybe Richie has fleas.

Once, after school, Eddie’s textbooks drowned in the last toilet on the right by a bully whose name he doesn’t know yet and refuses to learn, they all chase each other down the road, and Eddie trips, falls, skins his knee. He stares at the blood, and he doesn’t understand: he’s bled before, he’s touched vile things, he’s had monsters’ spit all over him, and yet here he is, after all that progress, breath short at the sight of gravel in his skin.

“Don’t cry, Eddie,” Richie tells him, hair sweaty like he’s run three miles already and not just from one bus stop to another. “It makes you look like shit.”

Eddie is _not_ crying. He’s just not breathing either.

Richie sighs dramatically, flails his arms, and then pretends to fall over. _Falls_ over. It doesn’t do shit, so he tries again, then grins, more crooked than his glasses, and proudly presents his own now-skinned knee.

“Disgusting,” Eddie decides, scrutinizing the disaster Richie has made of it. “You’re absolutely _disgusting_.”

Predictably, that only causes Richie’s grin to widen.

“That’s not what your mother—”

“What are you guys doing?” Stan calls out from the bottom of the hill.

What _are_ they doing?

Later, on his way home, Eddie searches for the scar on his palm and wonders how come he didn’t mind that oath of theirs at the time. Crawling through sewers clearly did fuck-all for his fear of germs, and so—

Only it was them holding hands, and he gets it, he really does. Back home, he cleans his knee, picking small pebbles out of the already scabbing wound, and knows for certain that he’d mind it less if it had been Richie who tripped him up and caused him to fall rather than poorly laid tarmac. 

(Wouldn’t mind it at all, maybe.)

*

It’s Bill who gets ahold of the porn magazine, even though he holds it by the corner, the way you would a rotten banana skin.

“I just don’t understand,” he says horrified, staring at the cover. Eddie’s collar is scratchy, and his throat is dry, in a bad way.

“I’ll gladly understand for you!” Richie says, grabbing for the magazine. He proceeds to spout filthy praise that’s so exaggerated that it can’t possibly be sincere.

Eddie doesn’t touch the thing and thinks of how his mother warned him about this, _bad, corrupted, stay away from girls_. At the time, he’d stand there with his toes curled in shame, wishing it to end, because he couldn’t imagine ever wanting to go against those particular instructions, only, somehow, it felt like an altogether different sort of failure rather than obedience.

He doesn’t understand either, but he doesn’t tell Bill that, because he has the feeling that they wouldn’t be talking about the same thing.

*

They’re fourteen when Richie drools all over some girl in the hallway. By ‘drools all over’ Eddie means that when Richie moves away from her, there’s a string of spit connecting their mouths, glinting in the sunlight like some terrible cinematic effect.

“But why would he _kiss_ her?” he says later, desperately trying to keep his lunch down.

“Why would she _let_ him?” says Ben, shaking his head in wonder.

“Mmm, _he_ ’s the blind one,” Stan agrees, frowning at his lunch tray as if it has all the answers. Inspired, Eddie stares down at his, but no luck – it only makes him all the more nauseous.

“Here,” he hisses when Richie joins them, and passes him an unpacked toothbrush under the table.

“Is it _drugs_?” Richie says, delighted. “Why, I never, Eddie Kaspbrak— Oh. I thought we’ve agreed that one doesn’t die from germs?”

“One does, in certain situations,” Eddie insists. “And besides, I don’t want you to spread her smell all over.”

“She smelled like eucalyptus,” Richie says, thoughtful. “She has a name, too.”

Eddie knows ‘she’ has a name, he’s just not interested in learning it, thank you very much.

(Mary Allen, born September the 8th here in Derry, sometime after midnight. Eddie’s yet to determine her blood type, but he’s on it. If she’s going to be sucking face with Richie, she better be available for a transfer if he drives off the side of the road thinking of her, never mind that they’re too young to drive.)

“I wanted to see what it’d feel like,” Richie says dramatically.

“What do you mean, you wanted to see what it’d feel like?” Stan says, arching an eyebrow. “Didn’t you lose your virginity at the age of ten?”

Richie snorts.

“Who told you that?”

“ _You_ did. _Repeatedly_. In gruesome detail. Using terms that describe birds’ anatomy while referring to girls’—”

“It’s all the same, Stan, trust me on this.”

“I _can’t_. You said girls had _cloacas_.”

“ _Jeez_ , Stanley, that was _years_ ago. Don’t you ever let anything go?”

“So what did it feel like?” Ben asks somewhat eagerly, leaning forward over the table. “The kissing?”

Next to him, Bill looks like he’s swallowed something wrong.

“Like snails,” Richie says, grave.

Eddie groans.

“Sort of! Like if one snail bumped into another snail and started going up that other’s snail shell, only there’s not enough space for it there—”

“Gross, gross, _gross._ ”

Richie sighs instead of continuing the tale, and Eddie doesn’t like it, not at all.

“Eddie, if your reaction to me kissing someone is smuggling me toothpaste, what are you gonna do when _you_ ’ll want to kiss someone? Tell the girl to drink bleach first?”

Easy, Eddie thinks but doesn’t say. I won’t want to kiss anyone, not _ever_.

After that, Richie is never seen kissing Mary Allen again.

“Just wasn’t _it_ ,” he explains when prompted, suddenly turned romantic, and only realizes what he’s said a few seconds later. The quiet before they all burst out laughing is the scariest thing Eddie’s heard since the last time he dreamed.

*

And he dreams of It all the time, only hardly ever remembers it after. He knows anyway, by how much he sweats through the sheets, and by the aggravating pain in his arm, exactly where it broke, like someone rhythmically pressing a needle to the bone there.

On one of the worst nights, Eddie stares into the mirror and brushes his teeth and flosses and flosses and flosses until he starts spitting out half-water, half-blood. He’s not sure what it is he’s trying to wash out – maybe the way he would scream once, and how he can’t scream anymore.

Back in his room, he stares at the dirty spot on his carpet where Richie dripped mustard once. He remembers scrubbing at it, and how it wouldn’t come off. Really, he didn’t try all that hard.

He makes sure the curtains are drawn (and what for?), then curls up around that dirty spot, ear pressed to the carpet and mites momentarily forgotten. Blessedly, he sleeps and almost doesn’t dream.

*

The earth is still swollen with rain when Richie finger-paints a dick onto Eddie’s cheek with mud between classes. Eddie, nightmares still ringing inside that one unlucky bone of his, startles awake to laughter and to something wet on his skin.

He doesn’t understand why the first thing he feels when he drags himself to the bathroom and sees his reflection is relief rather than horror. As he runs water and dabs at his cheek, he’s surprised to catch himself smiling.

*

He always wakes up in Derry, and never wakes up _from_ Derry. None of them ever do. 

*

He puts it to test later. At home, he draws a moustache over his lip using outdated jam, sinks his fingers in the earth of one of his mother’s potted plants, and makes snow-angels sans snow on the bathroom floor.

It doesn’t feel good. It feels _terrible_.

“Eddie, dear!” his mother howls from downstairs, and Eddie closes his eyes, wishing he didn’t exist.

Maybe he doesn’t. He thinks he must have, back when there was still dirt tracked by Richie’s fingers all over his face, but even if he’s here now, there’s no way to tell. 

*

There’s a girl who likes Richie when they’re fifteen, fuck knows why (name: Cadence, born: July 17th , blood type: incompatible with Richie’s), and Richie confesses that she seems to want to sleep with him.

Eddie doesn’t have time to question her decisions – he’s too busy questioning everything else. He sits Richie down on the carpet, walks in circles, and lists over twenty STDs. He waves around diagrams that he’s prepared just for the occasion, points to the crayon-colored columns, lists off statistics, and uses words over three syllables long, getting lost in sentences that would have far too many semicolons if written down.

Richie, bless him, shuts up for once in his life and listens. Once Eddie’s done, hair sticky with sweat, cheeks hot from the emotional turmoil of it all, and the backs of his knees itchy, because they always are, Richie pats the spot on the carpet right next to him, expectant. Eddie takes a deep breath and joins him there, careful not to let their knees touch, even though they’re both wearing jeans anyhow. Richie’s have holes, and Eddie doesn’t trust one single layer of fabric to— to.

“I’m not actually going to sleep with her, Eddie,” Richie says calmly. “She’s way too smart for me. It’s too much pressure, you know? She’s in the debate team, she wants to go to the moon one day, and the scariest thing is, I think she could actually pull it off.”

“Not much debating to be done on the moon,” Eddie mumbles, blushing at how childish he sounds.

“I’m not going to sleep with her,” Richie repeats, “but don’t you think it’s a little messed up that you’re acting like someone would die if I did?”

Eddie stops breathing for a second, has this half of a half-thought, but how do you know that I’d—?

“I know that you’ve done all this serious research on this, man, I know. I love the diagrams, Eds, I really do, but people are doing it like bunnies all over the world, and somehow we still haven’t gone extinct, so what’s the point of getting all worked up?”

Eddie frowns and thinks about it, only by the time Richie’s gone home, he still hasn’t thought himself into any explanation. He _has_ thought himself into the shower, and scrubs and scrubs at his skin like there’s something to scrub away, even though he hasn’t left the house since morning.

(It’s only once he’s in bed, eyes heavy with sleep, that it occurs to him that maybe what he keeps trying to wash off is himself.)

*

Richie is trying to lick his elbow when Eddie cuts his finger opening a can. Six profanities later, they’re both standing in a puddle of soda, Richie holding Eddie’s hand by the wrist.

“… And besides, fuck knows where this can has even _been_!”

“Inside your—”

“Do _not_.”

“Just lick it,” Richie advises once Eddie stops hyperventilating about not having a band-aid.

“ _Gross_!”

Richie grins and very deliberately swipes his tongue over the cut.

“Spit’s supposed to be good for it, right?” he says after, when Eddie has failed to pull away in disgust.

“One’s _own_ spit, asshole,” Eddie mumbles, flexing his finger. Strangely, he doesn’t think of diseases. Blood, it seems, is now all about context, bad when you’re wounded by something evil living in the sewers and losing it too fast, but something altogether different when you cut your palm open and clasp somebody else’s. This, now, is different still, only Eddie’s not sure how.

He's forgotten, hasn’t he? They all have. He’s been to hell and back, and he’s forgotten that it’s not just monsters who tear skin open, but the world itself, every second, someplace, somehow.

In the end, that’s how Eddie grows up: his blood on Richie’s lip and a resolution of a sort. That day, he starts carrying a small first-aid kit in his backpack, not for himself, but for the skin carelessly torn off Richie’s hands and for all the times they’ll stumble or have someone shove them.

*

“Enough, enough, enough, I’ve fucking had enough!” he yells, and doesn’t stop yelling, because when he’s quiet, his teeth keep knocking together, that’s how bad he’s shaking. “I’m out of here, Richie, and I swear, I’ll sleep on the fucking streets if I fucking have to, and you _know_ that there’s broken glass _all over_ the streets—”

Richie grips him by the shoulders, and Eddie doesn’t want to be gripped by the shoulders, only he can’t stand not being gripped by the shoulders either. Untouched, he feels like he’s floating and—

_we all float down here_

_–_ he’s always unmoored in this fucking house, and his mother, the sea itself.

“Eds, just breathe for half a minute, alright? Just br—”

“I’m leaving this town, alright?! I’m not going to— to waste time _breathing_ , of all fucking things, and I _can’t_ breathe anyway, and that’s _fine_ , because _of course_ I can’t, not until I’m fucking away from here!”

He has this idea, not that the world will be less scary outside of Derry, but that it’ll be cleaner, less— tainted. Derry is like a drain, where all the vile, dirty things crowd, and Eddie wants out. Showers don’t work, rain doesn’t work, and no matter how much Richie touches him (less and less with every passing year, careful with his hands now, like everything means enough to be a crime), the fingerprints Eddie feels all over his skin are always Mr. Keene’s, Eddie’s mother’s, Henry Bowers’, never ever good and never ever gone.

“Just breathe for half a minute, and I bet you’ll change your mind,” Richie tells him but doesn’t hand him an inhalator, which is just as well, because Eddie doesn’t fucking need it, except he does, oh, how he does.

But he won’t. Soon, he won’t. He will climb out of this, he will climb his way out of Derry, and he will climb his way out of himself—

“And if I don’t?” he says, and hates how shaky his voice is. Any moment now, Richie will start calling him a cry-baby and laughing at Eddie’s trembling lip. Any moment now. Any moment now. “ _And if I don’t_?”

“And if you don’t, then I’ll go with you,” Richie says, matter-of-fact, and gently pries the half-full bag out of Eddie’s hands. They’re kneeling on the floor of Eddie’s room, and why are they kneeling? Why would they be kneeling? Why would they be kneeling, like they’re asking for something, or maybe apologizing for something, even though there’s nothing to apologize for?

“You won’t,” Eddie says, because it’s blasphemy and it’s obscene, that Richie would have him hope for this. Cruel, even, and Eddie knows a thing or two about cruel. “You won’t, you wouldn’t, you have a life here, and what about your parents, and what about fucking Cadence?”

Richie blinks at him, slow like an owl, and Eddie thinks of how where his glasses rest on the bridge of his nose, Richie’s skin must be reddened and sore. He wants, more than anything, to take his glasses off for him and check. 

“Who’s Cadence?”

Eddie sighs and stares at his hands.

“I don’t think they’re for me, the Cadences of this world.”

Eddie is not brave enough to ask if by ‘Cadences’ Richie means aspiring astronauts, or something else.

“Where would we even go?”

Richie grins like he’s been waiting for it.

“Anywhere and everywhere, Eduardo! California, the Caribbean, the Moon!” He spreads his arms like the world really is free for the taking, a low-hanging fruit they’re just tall enough to reach. “Only hey, how about we stay here for a little longer?”

Eddie stares at the bare floorboards, where the mustard-stained carpet is no longer.

“She threw away my things,” he says, for the tenth time this evening. “She threw them away, just like that.”

There are fairy tales about this sort of thing, girls up in towers without windows and doors, and because Eddie’s house has thirteen potential exits (Eddie’s counted and he thinks about them all the time, fantasizing about escape routes when sleepless in the middle of the night), he might be brave enough to stay a bit longer and not use any of them just yet.

*

Sometimes, Eddie sits next to Stan and lets him talk about birds. It’s consoling in the way few things are, how Stan can go on and on about the plumage of something small enough to be hurt but always able to fly away.

“The ones that come back here after winter,” he says to Stan once, “they’re fucking _stupid_.”

Stan, wonder of wonders, nods.

“But what about those that never leave?”

Eddie covers his ears and pretends that they all leave, sooner or later. On his way home, he collects a feather and ends up holding on to it for months. 

*

When it happens, Eddie’s not there to witness it, which means that he’s not there to stop it, and Eddie will never forgive himself for it.

They find Richie sprawled on the side of the road, staring up at the sun with open eyes as if it’s something humans were made for, his blood all over his mouth and all over his shirt and all over the sidewalk.

Eddie doesn’t know what he wants more: to get to Richie and make it stop hurting, or to get to whoever did this, and make them hurt, but he only knows how to do one of the two, so he asks Richie about names and faces and directions and kicks and screams when Mike holds him still – loud enough for his eyes to water but not loud enough for the sky to open, and it should, it _should_.

(What he wants is for the bastards to still be here so he can kill them, what he wants is for someone to say that Richie had it coming so he can kill them too, what he wants is for Pennywise to be back so he can have something to destroy again.)

Is it always like this, he’ll ask Beverly on the phone later, and she’ll tell him. She’ll know.

They take Richie to Eddie’s house, where there are enough bandages to last him a lifetime, and Eddie refuses to so much as flinch as he throws away wipe after wipe, cleaning blood off Richie’s cuts. Richie, sat on the kitchen counter and staring at nothing, seems angry in a determined way, and only glances at Eddie when Eddie pokes at the mess they’ve made of his lip.

“I’m getting a car,” Richie tells him, grave. “I’m getting a car and I’m taking you away from here.”

Eddie doesn’t understand why Richie would say that when it’s him who got hurt, but he nods instead of arguing. He cleans cut after cut, and it occurs to him that what makes the wounds dirty is not Richie’s blood, but the fact of others’ hands touching those places, how some asshole’s knuckles dared leave a trace. He remembers a half-read article from years ago, about a man masturbating in churches, and feels the same kind of disgust.

(Who were they, and Richie won’t tell, won’t tell him a fucking thing, only says they used the f word, and not the one Eddie’s so fond of.)

“Does the split lip make me look hot?” Richie says, but without his usual enthusiasm, and Eddie goes on washing people unworthy of touching him off him and wonders how many suitcases they’d need between the two of them. He can’t help but think that, somehow, they’d make it work with just one.

(The two of them, they’d make it work with nothing at all.)

*

“You didn’t _really_ put laxatives in their lunch, did you?”

“My mom wouldn’t have used up all the boxes anyway.”

“Jesus _fuck_ , Eddie!”

Eddie doesn’t know how to explain it: he’d never use it, but it’s still comforting how, that day, there’s a knife at the bottom of his schoolbag.

*

“Bev, is it _always_ like this?”

*

“Why are we doing this again?”

“My mom’s birthday,” Richie reminds him, staring hopelessly at the five measuring cups he’s cradling in his arms. “We love her, remember?”

“I’m going to be the bigger fucking person, and not resort to perverse jokes,” Eddie says, eyeing an egg carton with distrust and trying not to think of the salmonella pamphlets his own mother keeps at the house. “Where’s Hanscom when you need him? I bet he’s good at baking and shit.”

“And shit,” Richie confirms with a pensive nod. “No doubt scribbling love letters on his dimpled knee, elsewhere.”

They’re trying to bake Mrs. Tozier’s favorite cookies, except Richie is in possession of only half the recipe, the page torn mercilessly right under the list of ingredients.

“I bet they’ll come out alright if we just mix it all together,” Richie says. He doesn’t sound convinced. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

“We could _die_.”

“Please, don’t elaborate.”

In the end, Eddie can’t keep himself from making that your-mother joke, and Richie, who was about to crack an egg on the edge of a plastic bowl, considers him with an almost-grin and cracks it on Eddie’s head instead.

Eddie doesn’t know the name of the feeling that overcomes him just then, the egg gluing his hair and yolk trickling to his nose, lazy like a summer afternoon. It’s relief, but it’s not just that. Foreboding, perhaps, but the sort of foreboding where, even though you know that what’s coming is bad, you’re still ready to welcome it. Eddie feels it ringing in his once-broken bone, but for once, the way it hurts is sweet.

Eddie gropes blindly until he too gets ahold of an egg, and then cracks it on Richie’s forehead. There’s no finesse to it: he crushes the egg in his hand and smears it all over Richie’s face, dislodging his glasses, rubs it into Richie’s hair, and Richie – this is important – Richie _lets_ him. He’s not struggling, not running away, not even retaliating, and outside, Derry goes on, but inside, just for them, the time has stopped.

“Not bad,” Richie says, smacking his lips. “A bit undercooked.”

Eddie grabs a fistful of flour and throws it in his face, laughing all the while. Soon, Richie is smearing butter all over Eddie’s mouth, and soon, they’re slipping on the oil spilled all over the floor, and soon, eggshells are cracking beneath them in some never-ending nonsense that, just then, could even be a song, and soon, Eddie is putting baking soda under the hem of Richie’s shirt, and soon, their legs suddenly tangled, Richie is telling him to try the sugar, just try the sugar, you asshole, as if Eddie’s never tried fucking sugar before, except Richie has all the sugar on his fingers, the rest up on the counter where Eddie doesn’t want to know how to reach, and so Eddie closes his lips on Richie’s finger, and holy shit, Richie is right, he’s right, because Eddie has clearly never tasted sugar before, has never tasted anything at all.

(He takes Richie’s glasses off for him, and there it is, that sore, reddened skin. Eddie tries to clean the glasses with the hem of his shirt, but there’s too much egg, too much oil, it’s a lost cause – they’ll never be clean, and how delightful to simply think: so be it.)

At some point, time restarts, sluggish, and next Eddie knows, he’s on his back, moving limbs up and down, sliding them through this beautiful, disgusting mess they’ve made of Richie’s kitchen, and he’s not thinking of everything that has touched this floor before, and he’s not thinking of everything that has touched Richie’s fingers before, but he _is_ thinking of all the things Richie’s fingers have touched before, and he wants to be next. When he licks his lip, he can taste the sun itself.

“I’m getting a car,” Richie says nonsensically in a sudden downpour of chocolate chips, and Eddie leans in to kiss him.

“Wait,” Richie says, a hand between their lips. “Don’t I need to brush my teeth first?”

Eddie laughs, licks his palm, and shakes his head no. It’s only n kisses later that he discovers it: on Richie’s knee, there’s a reminder of when he skinned it for Eddie in the form of a grimace-shaped scar.

*

“Bev, is it _always_ like this?” Eddie asks, gripping the phone with a shaking hand.

“What do you mean?”

“When you love someone,” Eddie explains in a lowered voice, glancing over his shoulder to check that his mother’s not there, eavesdropping. “When you love someone, does it always mean that you hate everyone else?”

Beverly is quiet for a while, seconds stretching into minutes.

“I suppose that depends on who it is you love.”

Eddie has only ever loved one person, and it’s never not felt like the promise of a broken nose, only he got it wrong, because it’s not him whose nose has been broken, and it’s no longer his nose that he’s scared for.

“Is he alright?” Bev asks, almost apologetic in this admission, and Eddie’s not strong enough for the phone to explode in his hand, but oh, if he were.

Truth is, he wants to murder the whole world for daring to lay hands on Richie. Truth is, he wants to destroy the world for daring to be a place where Richie is not safe. Truth is, Richie might be getting a car, but what if Eddie got one first?

Truth is, he almost kept all those wipes dirty with Richie’s blood.

He only realizes that he’s crying once Bev starts making cooing noises. The tears keep coming, but he keeps stubbornly wiping at his eyes, because he’s had enough: now, he’s going to be brave.

*

Later, they’re still tangled together on the floor, bathed in sunlight, and Eddie has Richie all over, dried in his hair, crusted on his chin, soaked through his shirt. If everything they’ve thrown at each other is evidence, then Eddie is the most straightforward crime scene in history, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. His nose’s not broken yet, and Richie’s nose has only been broken once, and in a moment, Eddie will kiss the place where it’s regrown slightly crooked, but now, he’s too busy falling asleep without having scrubbed himself clean first, sinking into what he knows will be a blissful lack of dreams.

**Author's Note:**

> This was somewhat inspired by the "Fried Green Tomatoes" food fight scene, even though I have only read the book, which, as far as I can remember, doesn't even have it. Still, here's a [link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmC-jHIqABM) if anyone's into girls smearing fruit all over each other's faces as a sign of love
> 
> Anyway, IT has really just... ruined our lives, hasn't it? :,) 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!! <3 Comments make me incredibly happy, so if you have any thoughts, I'd love to hear (read?) them :)) (English not being my first language, any glaring mistakes brought to my attention will be much appreciated also!) And finally, I'm on tumblr @yoyointhegarden


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